New night and network, but Al Michaels’ top-rated football show goes on

Since NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” is for the second year the nation’s highest-rated prime-time program, surely this means Al Michaels is equal parts Simon Cowell, Mike Wallace, Regis Philbin, J.R. Ewing and Ben Cartwright, with Ed Sullivan thrown in for good measure.

Michaels, after all, follows in Sullivan’s footsteps as the host of the “really big shew,” helping set the agenda for the week’s sports chatter much as Sullivan helped set tastes in music and comedy.

“I don’t know that we’re Ed Sullivan,” Michaels said. “Maybe you could say that the Kardashians are the ‘Sunday Night Football’ of cable.”

‘We’re No. 1’

Fueled by that unsettling notion, perhaps it’s best to dispense with comparisons and stipulate that Michaels is what he has been for 27 seasons: ringmaster of the NFL’s prime-time showcase, albeit moved up one day from his longtime run with ABC’s “Monday Night Football.”

The surprise is not that Michaels is still at the helm but that changing times have conspired to make the NFL’s showcase package into TV’s top prime-time show and that it has done so not on Mondays, but Sundays.

“I didn’t think you could make Sunday the primary night,” Michaels said. “But look at what we’re doing. We don’t go around with the foam finger saying ‘We’re No. 1’ … but now that we are there, it’s a tremendous source of pride. We want to stay No. 1.”

The show originates tonight for the first time from Reliant Stadium for Packers-Texans. It’s the Texans’ first Sunday night game on NBC and the first time Michaels has called a game in Houston since 1994, when ABC had Jeff Fisher’s coaching debut for the 1-9 Oilers against the Giants.

“The fun thing is that since the Texans have not had that much national exposure, you can go back to the beginning with them — Matt Schaub, J.J. Watt coming out of nowhere, Arian Foster, how you go from delivering pizza to becoming player of the year,” Michaels said. “We will tell the best stories that bring the Texans to life.”

That’s not dissimilar to Michaels’ agenda when he worked on Monday nights with Frank Gifford, Dan Dierdorf, Dennis Miller, John Madden and others from 1986 through 2005. What has changed, he said, are the network and its agenda.

During his later years with ABC, Michaels said, “there was an undercurrent that we spent too much money for this and we need more bang for the buck and want to use it for a promotional tool. I heard that so much that I got sick of it.”

Change of address

Much in the fashion that veterans like Keith Jackson chafed at ESPN’s control over ABC Sports, Michaels fumed when ESPN hesitated over whether to retain him and Madden for its Monday night package or to use its Sunday crew of Mike Patrick and Joe Theismann.

“Within four hours, John was out the door,” Michaels said. “That was one of the dumbest decisions in the history of sports broadcasting.”

NBC added Michaels when it gave Disney the rights to Walt Disney’s first cartoon creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, and so Michaels and Madden and the production team of producer Fred Gaudelli and director Drew Escoff were reunited on a new night with a new agenda.

“At ABC, they told us if you just do a great game, you’ve failed,” Gaudelli said. “They were on us to do more than a game, and there was constant stress from the entertainment division to bring in celebrities.

“When we came to NBC in 2006, (former NBC Sports chairman) Dick Ebersol said he wanted the best football production, bar none. We do the best promos we can for the entertainment division, but we want to be about football.”

Gaudelli’s preparation begins in June, when he travels to Nashville, Tenn., to prepare lyrics and shoot Faith Hill’s opening theme, “I’ve Been Waiting All Day For Sunday Night,” set to the tune of Joan Jett’s “I Hate Myself For Loving You.”

Several sets of lyrics are prepared for each game; in this case, Gaudelli said, NBC will use a version in which Hill sings about “Packers and the Texans in a nasty showdown.”

On-field action — not to mention Hill’s opening — help capture the male demographic. But “Sunday Night Football” also is the No. 2-ranked show among women viewers, and Gaudelli credits that in part to the network’s efforts to personalize players.

“We try to give you something for everyone without sacrificing coverage of the game,” he said. “We use photos without helmets that show personality, and try to give you a sense of who these people are.”

Numbers game

Six years in, Sunday night is pulling away from ESPN’s Monday night game. In 2006, it averaged 17.5 million viewers to 12.3 million for Monday night. Last year, the spread was 21.5 million to 13.3 million, and so far this season it’s 22.5 million to 14 million.

“I didn’t think there was any way to reverse 35 years of tradition,” Gaudelli said. “But tastes have changed. There aren’t as many sitcoms or scripted dramas. There are more reality shows.

“Add to that the fact that the NFL keeps getting bigger and that NBC made such a push to make Sunday a big night, and it’s all come together. That has shocked me. That we would become the No. 1 prime time show, I don’t think anybody saw that coming.”

For Michaels, who now works alongside Cris Collinsworth, prime-time football remains “the best job in the history of the world.”

“There is still a sense of wonder about it,” he said. “The great thing about sports is that even though you may have seen 28 million games, you don’t know what will happen. It’s one-take television.”